Days of the Fallen Sun

Enduring metalgaze outfit Junius have been plugging away for ten years, mixing lead singer Joseph E. Martinez's clean-toned vocals with doom-metal guitars and soaring choruses. Their new Days of the Fallen Sun EP includes some of the strongest and most sensuous work they've done.

Junius are an enduring metalgaze outfit from Boston with an abiding interest in melodrama and reverb pedals. They've been plugging away for ten years, mixing lead singer Joseph E. Martinez's mournful, clean-toned vocals with doom-metal guitars and the sort of soaring choruses that have earned them the possibly-derisive tag "Morrissey metal" in metal circles.

Their first full-length, 2009's The Martyrdom of a Catastrophist, took a disgraced scientist named Immanuel Velikovksy as its subject, and their new EP, Days of the Fallen Sun, is apparently a "prequel." The broad, vague lyrics don't encourage parsing how, or why, Junius are so drawn to Velikovsky, or what he has to do with this music. Like Martyrdom, however, Days is beautifully recorded and mixed. Producer Will Benoit, who recorded some of Junius's earliest EPs and who returns here, brings a handsome sound, the inky shimmer of the doom guitars mingling with the synth like thick-shelled bugs scuttling in moonlight.

Martinez has a great voice as well, a plummy and faintly ludicrous black-lacquered baritone. Everything that passes through this chamber emerges at Maximum Portentous; "We are the dreams of Gods/ We are the lights that follow/ We have embraced the dark/ We are the light, we are the fire," he intones on "Forgiving The Cleansing Meteor", the most powerful track on the EP. "You fall upon your knees and scream for release," he sings, tenderly, on "A Day Dark With a Night". Every line sounds like a prophecy, and every chorus feels like a flaming boulder hoisted via catapult into a stone wall.

The EP is stitched together by ambient interludes, which break up every song. Totalling half the track list and not more than four minutes, they pad out Days unnecessarily without adding much. The four full songs, "The Time of Perfect Virtue", "A Day Dark With Night", "Battle In The Sky", and the climactic "Forgiving the Cleansing Meteor", are some of the strongest and most sensuous work they've done. "A Day Dark With Night", in particular, churns through several keys in its midsection, rising wordlessly to ecstatic post-rock highs. It's a shame these weren't part of a longer record, something weightier and more immersive. They hint that Junius, a band known for taking its time between release, might be able to craft something pretty spectacular.